The Speculist

Via InstaPundit, James Miller has a review of Ray Kurzweil's soon-to-be-published book, The Singularity is Near. Inasmuch as co-blogger Stephen Gordon recently spilled the beans on FastForward Radio about having acquired an advance copy himself, I expect we will also see a review on this site before too long. (UPDATE: see Stephen's latest.)

Professor Miller opines that Kurzweil may be a shade more optimistic than is warranted -- suggesting the alternative title of The Singularity is Probably Near. He proposes that a good way to track the likelihood of the Singularity would be to set up a Futures Market, and describes how he tried to get a very limited one going:

Rather then just looking at existing markets, however, believers in the possibility of a mid-century Singularity should design Singularity prediction markets. I attempted to do this myself, on a very small scale, when I proposed a bet to Kurzweil. Under the bet I would give him a very small amount of money today and in return at some future agreed-upon date he would give me a 10-meter-diameter solid diamond sphere. The idea behind my bet was that if the Singularity were near, nanotechnology would make it very easy to make large diamonds in the relatively near future. Kurzweil, alas, turned me down. He emailed me making the very reasonable argument that "Everything I write about could come true and for physical reasons that are not currently understood a ten-meter-round diamond might be hard to fabricate."

This story, along with whole notion of a futures market for the Singularity, got me thinking about my recent post on Future Wealth. The proposition there was that if radical life extension really will be with us soon, people might want to start thinking about very long term investments. I envision bonds with maturation periods in the centuries.

Interestingly, looked at as a futures market, such investments would be seen as favoring the coming of life extension, but not the Singularity. There are no investment plans for the Singularity. Trying to "save up" for the Singularity would reveal a profound lack of understanding as to what the Singularity is. As the poet Kahlil Gibran put it (in a somewhat different context):

And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the overprudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city?

In an e-mail, James Miller explained the fallacy in more economic terms:

If the singularity is near, we will all probably be very rich, by today's standards, in 100 years. This probably means you would prefer to have a small sum of money today than a lot of money in the future after a singularity. (Forexample, if you knew you would win $100 million next year you would spend all the money you had this year even if a bank offered you a very high interest rate.) So believers in the singularity should probably save less.

Which leads me to ask the following: if one is completely convinced that the Singularity is near, why save money for your childrens' education? After merging with artificial intelligence to form the next stage in human evolution, the kids will be plenty smart, anyhow.

And yet, I suspect that even the most ardent transhumanist parent will still take steps to educate his or her child. Likewise, those who are are convinced that the Singularity is probably near might want to hedge their bets, just in case some portion of the Singularity scenario -- radical life extension -- emerges well before the rest of it -- transcendence to a state of super-intelligent "godhood."

So if things work out according to plan, you're Superman. The worst case* scenario is that you end up living for centuries with tremendous wealth on your hands. Investing very long-term isn't a bet against the Singularity. It's just a means of covering the spread, sort of a post-modern version of Pascal's Wager.

* Well, okay, I suppose that the worst case scenario is that life extension doesn't work out, the bond fund goes bust, and you end up on a very long flight seated between two huge guys who had too much chili for lunch. Granted.